by Helen Kitson
How ironic, now that I’d been placed in a position where I could never seek a publisher no matter how brilliant a book I wrote, that the need to write burned more fiercely than it ever had.
When another postcard arrived from Simon, I pinned it to the cork pin board above my computer.
Venice, I typed, city of masks and glass and murky water. Of palaces and ducats and pickpockets who pluck heart-shaped rubies from empty pockets. Of young men with beautiful faces who quote Shakespeare to ladies in the early autumn of their years, making them sing, making their branches erupt with one final freakish blossoming of love…
I helped myself to lemonade. Lisel had invited me to her house for a meal and she’d slipped off to the kitchen to fetch more bread.
‘I shall be seventy-six in less than two months’ time,’ she said when she returned. ‘Such a nuisance, getting older. I can’t bear it when people tell me I’m wonderful for my age, as if I were a pocket calculator.’
‘It’s meant as a compliment, I’m sure.’
‘Oh, certainly, which is why I always smile graciously. What else can one do? Viv keeps dropping hints about some birthday surprise she and the other members of the book group have planned for me, and I’m sure it will be awful. I’m already dreading it, even though I’m terribly grateful at the same time.’
Perhaps it would be nothing worse than a few balloons and a cake loaded with too many candles. To say that Viv meant well was to damn her with faint praise, and really she deserved more credit for her kindnesses.
‘Viv tells me you’re writing again,’ she said. ‘That is good news.’ Perhaps sensing from my dipped head that I didn’t care to pursue this subject, she added, ‘And how are Viv’s big ideas for putting Morevale on the literary map coming along?’
‘Oh, I doubt her ambitions are anything like as grand as that. She wants to keep her job, that’s all. She’s certainly very enthusiastic.’
Lisel frowned. ‘Don’t let her boss you into doing anything you don’t want to do. It’s far more important you get your book written.’
‘Oh, I shan’t let her boss me, although the book probably won’t come to anything.’
She leaned back in her chair. We’d enjoyed an informal meal of vegetable lasagne and salad. ‘Shall we have our dessert in the conservatory? I’ll put some coffee on.’
I took a seat at the glass-topped rattan table. Dessert turned out to be a fruit pavlova topped with slices of kiwi fruit and drizzled with passion fruit pulp.
‘Home-made, for what it’s worth,’ Lisel said, placing her cardigan over the arm of her chair. ‘I like good food, but no dish is worth spending more than an hour in the kitchen to prepare.’
I gazed out at the garden, which she assured me would be a riot of hollyhocks, lavender, buddleia and rhododendron in the summer. A winding path led to a small wooden structure at the bottom of the garden, which I supposed one might describe as a mini summerhouse, just large enough to contain one padded seat.
‘The daffodils will soon be out,’ Lisel said, following my eye. ‘I like to sit out here even in bad weather. It reassures me.’ After a pause, she added, ‘So why did you start writing again?’
I spooned up some of my dessert, thinking what a pity it was that passion fruit were so fiddly and each fruit held so little.
‘Simon,’ I said.
‘Clearly you don’t want to elaborate, and there’s no reason why you should.’
‘It would take far too long to explain. I’m not even sure I could explain in any way that made sense.’
‘Secrets—’
‘We all have them. As you said yourself. And yes, I have secrets, but I no longer feel any great urge to share them. I did speak to the vicar. I think that helped.’
Lisel smiled. ‘Cheaper than a psychiatrist, at any rate. Pleasant man, isn’t he? Oh, dear, that does sound mealy-mouthed!’
‘Pleasant being a euphemism for what, exactly?’
She leaned back, pursing her lips, fingers tapping the armrests of her seat. ‘Timid, perhaps. One can’t dislike him, but I’m not sure there’s much backbone there. Perhaps he has hidden strengths. I wonder why he never married. Couldn’t find the right type, do you think?’
‘Type?’
‘Competent, no-nonsense, self-effacing. Or am I being unfair?’
‘I don’t know. Simon… Well, he once made a silly suggestion that I should marry Mr Latham myself.’
Lisel raised her eyebrows. ‘What an appalling prospect! Or is it? I’ve never fancied the idea of marriage.’
‘I often wonder if Madeleine would have married if she’d lived.’
‘A great pity what happened to her. Such a tragic waste of a young life for the sake of a few moments’ inattention.’
‘It wasn’t an accident. She killed herself.’
‘What did she want to go and do a thing like that for?’ Lisel shivered and draped her cardigan around her shoulders. ‘Her parents expected too much from her, of course,’ Lisel continued, dropping a plastic cover over the shattered remains of the fruit pavlova. ‘All that boasting about Maddie being brilliant; all the remarkable things the girl was going to do with her life.’
‘What sort of things?’ Had they had any inkling, then, that Madeleine was writing a book?
Lisel chuckled. ‘I’m basing my judgements on one conversation I had with them when Maddie was thirteen. Even then they were talking about her future as an academic and the brilliant marriage she would make to some eminent professor or other. It was all pie in the sky.’
Was that all? As vague as that? I couldn’t help but feel relieved.
‘I can’t have exchanged more than a handful of words with them after they decided ours wasn’t the right school for their precious daughter, by which they probably meant the fees were too high, even with a scholarship.’
‘They rarely spoke to me after she died. I think they blamed me, thought I should have done more to help her.’
‘Goodness me, what could you have done? You weren’t responsible for her actions. No one was.’
‘I knew she was unhappy, depressed even.’
‘And? If you’d spoken to her parents, would they have paid any attention?’
‘Probably not. But – I was there, you see, when she drowned.’ A problem shared… ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’
‘Well, there’s no point telling me half a story.’
‘I followed her. I saw her step into the water, I saw her go under… I tried to reach her, but I can’t swim. I was useless. Worse than useless. I would have done better to run for help instead of thinking there was any point in following her into the water.’
‘It doesn’t take many minutes to drown. You were young and frightened. Unless you pushed her into the water yourself, which I assume you didn’t, then you shouldn’t torment yourself with these thoughts. What possible good can it do?’
‘None, of course. But maybe there’s a part of me that wanted her to drown.’
‘Quite possibly, if you saw her as a rival – however unconsciously.’
‘I always suspected her parents knew that, and that was why they turned against me.’
‘Far more likely they simply resented you for being alive when their daughter wasn’t.’
‘So… If you had reason to believe someone intended to take their own life—’
Lisel raised her eyebrows. ‘I’d let them get on with it. I’m sorry if that sounds callous. Oh, in reality I suppose I would try to help – tell them to speak to their doctor or priest, depending on their inclinations. None of us is a saint. We can’t save other people in some Christ-like fashion, however much we’d like to. As I heard someone say on the radio yesterday, the past is a statement, the future a question. We all have the occasional dark night of the soul about things we could have done better, but dwelling on them is fruitless.’
‘What’s done is done?’
‘Well, isn’t it? Your guilt, shame, whatever you want to call it, won’t make
a damn bit of difference to Maddie or to her parents.’
‘You think I’m wallowing?’
‘Yes, I think you are. Would you prefer to go back inside?’
‘I’d like to stay here for a little longer.’
Lisel took her time fetching the coffee; deliberately, I assumed, to give me time to compose myself. All these years I’d lived with Madeleine’s ghost hovering over my shoulder. My best friend. But she wasn’t. I’d hung on to that fiction for too long, unwilling to concede that we had grown apart; that we’d remained friends out of habit and perhaps, in her case, a sense of obligation. Giving her manuscript to me had not been an act of love, but rather a parting gift after she’d shucked off everything else, having decided not to stick around. She’d already given away her son and I would never know the circumstances in which that had happened; could only conjecture, and clearly there was nothing to be gained from that.
Lisel gently squeezed my shoulder. ‘All right now?’
I nodded, taking the tray from her.
‘If she hadn’t died—’
‘But she did. Why didn’t you go to university, Gabrielle?’
‘I wasn’t clever enough. A plodder.’
‘Let me guess – Maddie was a straight-A student, seemed to produce good work without any effort?’
I nodded.
‘Do you ever wonder what happens to these child prodigies that occasionally make the news? Children who can read fluently when they can barely walk, solve complicated algebraic equations while they’re strapped in a high chair? At some point most of them level off, the academic gap between them and their peers narrows. Perhaps it never completely disappears, but it becomes far less spectacular.’
‘Madeleine wasn’t like that. Just very bright, very gifted.’
‘I daresay, but perhaps she peaked too soon, while you might have peaked – academically speaking – at university. It might have been good for you to get away from her – properly away, I mean, rather than being separated because she chose to leave.’
‘Did you ever have a best friend, Lisel? Someone you thought you’d do anything for?
‘Not since I was about eleven, and only then because I went to a boarding school, where friendships tend to be quite intense. I grew out of any tendency to hero-worship when I overheard my favourite teacher moaning to a colleague about how much she loathed her job and the brats she was obliged to teach.’
‘That’s a bit different, though, isn’t it? An adult – someone in a position of responsibility; someone you didn’t really know.’
‘Even so, it made me realise – and I was only a child, remember, still very innocent in the ways of the world – that people might say one thing but mean something else. We place a lot of value on whether a person is trustworthy or not, but is it really the most important thing? Would you rather be liked or trusted?’
‘I’d be happy with either.’
‘And Madeleine – did you trust her?’
‘With what? My secrets? My life?’
‘Just generally. You see, I wonder if you saw things in Maddie that weren’t there. Because she died – young, tragically – that makes it difficult for anyone to criticise her without sounding heartless. But it doesn’t mean her life meant any less.’
Had I, in fact, hung on to a poetic stereotype – the golden girl, the beautiful corpse?
‘I suppose, if I’m honest, I often disliked her in the last few years. I think I got on her nerves. I felt like the poor relation. She chose not to entrust me with her biggest secret, which I discovered only quite recently. But she must have had her reasons.’
‘Let go of her. She was as flawed as the rest of us. Don’t be like the pitiful pet dog who refuses to leave its master’s grave, pining away through misplaced faithfulness.’
I smiled. ‘I was never her slave.’
‘Not in fact, perhaps, but wouldn’t you have done anything she’d asked of you? If she said that you, and no one else, were the person she needed?’
‘But she never did.’
‘So add rejected suitor to list of roles you need to relinquish.’
‘You ought to be a psychologist,’ I teased.
‘Good lord, no! I think it’s a shame when people become so mired in the past they forget to live in the present. I don’t think that’s quite what you’ve done, but it irritates me that you speak about yourself so humbly when you compare yourself with Maddie.’
I’d heard it said that in any relationship there is the lover and the one who is loved. Perhaps there is always one partner who loves just a little bit more, and of course that had been me with Madeleine. We were both only children, neither of us particularly spoilt or indulged by our parents, our upbringing identical in most respects. She wasn’t bossy and I hadn’t been unusually shy. Somehow, though, we had slipped into our roles, with me mentally walking two paces behind her, proud to have such a beautiful, clever friend.
‘I’m getting cold,’ Lisel said. ‘I think it’s time we went inside.’
I carried the tray into the kitchen. Lisel made more coffee and showed me a few snapshots of herself when she was younger. I was particularly taken by a photograph of her standing next to a powder-blue Mini, posing with one hand on the car door as if to open it, get in and drive away, her eyes hidden behind huge sunglasses, legs encased in knee-high white plastic boots of the type fashionable then.
‘My brother’s car, not mine,’ she said. ‘I was terribly jealous – I had to catch a bus to work while he whizzed off in his snazzy Mini. He died a few months after this photo was taken – a climbing accident. I asked my father if I could have the car since it was of no further use to Nick. He was never a violent man, rarely lost his temper, but he slapped my face.’
Gently she laid the palm of her hand against her cheek, as if she could still feel the sting of that slap.
‘He sold the car,’ she continued. ‘We never discussed the matter, but I don’t think we ever quite forgave each other. Nick was another of those golden people, like Maddie. When memories are the only things that remain of someone, it’s only the good ones we want to preserve.’
‘He was your only sibling?’
‘Yes. We were close – I admired him – but there have been times, since his death, when I’ve come close to hating him – for dying, for leaving our parents with me as poor compensation.’
‘But you got over it? Learned to live with it?’
‘One must. The remark I made about the car was insensitive, but it wasn’t my fault he’d died; not my fault if my parents wished – as I’m sure they sometimes did, for they were only human, too – that I had died instead of Nick.’ She gave a gentle laugh. ‘Don’t look so shocked, my dear. They were kind, loving people, but grief isn’t reasonable. I daresay Maddie’s parents wished you had been dragged lifeless from that river instead of their daughter, and felt soul-crushingly guilty for thinking such a thing.’
When I got home I poured myself a glass of whisky, something I rarely drank. In my mind I kept seeing that picture of the powder-blue Mini, Lisel posing next to it in her fashionable Sixties clothes, faking ownership of something that could never be hers.
Chapter Twenty-Five
‘It’s nice to see you so busy,’ Mr Latham said. ‘The workshops and so forth.’
I’d decided there was no point in being half-hearted. I’d allowed myself to get caught up in Viv’s enthusiasm, and the fact that my novel was progressing well made me feel I had some justification in describing myself as a writer.
Viv had coached me in the rudiments of how to run a workshop. The hardest part was finding a tactful way to tell someone their work had little merit. One always had to find a few constructive things to say, and for most people that seemed to be enough. My credentials – my status as a published author – were usually sufficient to give my advice some weight. And the ambitions of most of my students didn’t rise far above getting a poem in the Poets’ Corner section of the local free paper. Thus I tried to
tailor my advice to suit their modest ambitions, querying a clumsy rhyme, a faulty scansion. I was almost as delighted as they were when they pitched up for workshop sessions brandishing a copy of a freebie newspaper or parish magazine in which their work had been included.
‘Do you have any budding geniuses?’ Mr Latham asked, polishing his glasses with a cotton handkerchief.
‘A couple who like to think they are.’ One obnoxious young man in particular, who had no time for any writer apart from Chuck Palahniuk and never forgave me for telling him he wouldn’t get anywhere unless he was prepared to read more widely.
I felt rather embarrassed that I’d ever entertained a fanciful notion of marrying Mr Latham. Timid, Lisel had called him. Kind-hearted, well-meaning, but I couldn’t help wondering if he was as wary of becoming too closely involved with God as he was with people. God, I supposed, asked rather less of him than human beings with their complicated, disruptive emotions. Arm’s length and no further.
‘You certainly seem a lot more cheerful,’ he said, replacing his glasses, making finicky adjustments that would have annoyed any wife. He sounded relieved. Our relationship could return to how it had been before – polite, amicable, but with that perceptible distance between us. I felt certain he would never marry, although he might have been the type to make a late, reckless marriage to a widow a little older than himself with a colourful wardrobe and a forceful personality. I almost felt like warning him of the dangers posed by this mythical potential bride. Wrong of me to ascribe unworldliness to him simply because he was a vicar. No reason, either, to suppose he wouldn’t welcome the embraces of a jolly widow with – as the phrase goes – no side to her.
‘It’s good fun on the whole,’ I said. ‘I never knew there were so many aspiring writers around here.’
For most of them it was simply a hobby, on a par with knitting or baking. For others, writing functioned as therapy – they used poetry and fiction to make sense of their feelings, their difficulties, their grief. At first I’d been hard pressed to know what to say when someone shared with me a poem or short story about their miscarriage, their redundancy, their irritable bowel. But they didn’t want to create great art from their misfortunes, simply work out their feelings and make their mark. Writing gave them a voice, even if their work was only to be shared with me and the other students in the workshop. Indeed, I made it a condition of membership that students didn’t discuss other people’s work with outsiders. What happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas.